Music Computer

Home / Music / Studio / Computer

Musical Box

This page charts the current compute power of the studio. In 2011 I built a new machine called "audentity", a supercomputer to develop my audio identity. This thankfully supersedes the 3GHz Pentium IV kindly donated by Barry and an even older PIII machine I'd been limping along with. Former planned (but never built) systems are archived here and here for nostalgic quaintness.

Freedom to create

I'm a firm believer in using open standards to make music that will last, and so use GNU/Linux as a robust and secure platform. A few years back, it didn't have all the flashy bells and whistles of other closed operating systems (nor the viruses or inflated prices! ;-) But recent years have seen much work on all fronts, so nowadays it's easier and safer to install and use than other platforms. More crucially it excels at the important things, namely reliable low-latency operation, complete user-configurability, powerful file handling and scripting capabilities.

Ethically sound

Rather than the selfish result of a single corporation's lust for world-domination, Linux is based on the combined efforts of thousands of software experts worldwide, who build on the work of well-thought out principles instead of reinventing the wheel each time with shiny but ultimately confusing and pointless newfangled gimmicks. Since the development is all open and free for anyone to contribute, it promotes co-operation and collaboration, thus protecting the user from becoming locked into a particular company's overpriced products which become obsolete when the company folds. If you want a feature implementing in a program you use, you are free to go right ahead and do it, or even ask a developer or pay them a bounty to do it. Try that with your average proprietary company! While the idea of not having a technical support droid to phone up and complain to may disconcert some people, the friendly community of Linux Audio users and developers are always quick to help out with suggestions and bug fixes, much more responsive than any company. After many years of development, the tools have reached truly professional levels and have the distinct advantage of intelligent design, using the Unix philosophy of lots of small tools capable of specific tasks, all interconnected to form a very powerful system.

New music is going online as fast we can edit it!